The Folk Economics of Housing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4029672 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher S Elmendorf (Christopher S. Elmendorf is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, University of California—Davis, Davis, California, and Nonresident Senior Fellow, Institute for Progress, Washington, DC. .), Clayton Nall (0000-0001-5312-9607, Stan Oklobdzija is Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, University of California—Riverside, Riverside, California. .), Stan Oklobdzija (0000-0002-8082-5824, Stan Oklobdzija is Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy, University of California—Riverside, Riverside, California. .) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 45-66 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0895-3309 • E-ISSN: 1944-7965 |
| Publisher | American Economic Association (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1257/jep.20241428 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 8 |
Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |